:: September 2005 Volume 4/Number 6

Why Meditation Matters: Sit down and join the revolution.

By Bob Belinoff

Meditation as a technology to live in the world, to find peace inside and further it outside ourselves is, after stalling in the nineties, once again a growing movement here in California and around the world. Thank God.

More yoga studios are offering classes in meditation, more meditation retreats are opening and more people are attending the established centers. The Expanding Light Retreat Center in Nevada City is looking for more teachers for its class offerings. The Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement is planning the construction of 3000 new Peace Palaces world wide, with more than 100 in the U.S. and 30 in California alone. More research is proving the health and social benefits of meditation – the Dalai Lama will preside over a conference this fall to review that research. Hospitals that once shunned the very idea, now routinely offer meditation classes on an out-patient basis. And perhaps most intriguingly, practices that are not quite meditation but that lead to a more meditative state are seeping into our entertainment, recreation and business life.

Meditation and the meditative state, is revolutionary in whatever form it is practiced. In China at one point you could get arrested for it. The government there clamped down hard on the Falon Gong, an organized meditation movement – because it brought people a way out of the system – freedom - their own time and space.
To meditate is to disengage from the babbling of your own mind and the incoherence of the world around you – and in so doing it dis-empowers both. It can be facilitated thru the repeating of a word or phrase, a mantra, focusing on a candle flame, chanting or simply observing your thoughts and letting them go until you run out of things to think about – at which point the reasoning often fearful mind gives up, leaving you with the only thing that lasts forever - awareness and what Deepak Chopra reminds us is “pure potentiality.”

To disengage from the system in such a way is to tune into a frequency not often encouraged on the public airwaves but available to all. When enough people disengage from a belief system it collapses – like a war effort or a wall.

The reason meditation is not much of a media story is simple. There is no conflict, no drama, no winner or no loser. There is nothing to buy and the practice leads inevitably to the idea that something other than the marketplace makes the wheels go round. The practice has been a part of every spiritual tradition since recorded time. Sitting meditation is not the only way to create changes in your mental state or your life, but it is an especially radical brain wave remodeling program, and the results are immediately obvious after only a single thoughtless workout.
To leave all thought behind is to exercise the muscle that helps you dis-identify with an insane world and your egoic mind. It doesn’t mean you can’t play in it any longer, it just means you now have a partner – what physicist John Haeglin calls “the unified self-interacting structure of consciousness” and many of the rest of us call God.

John Haeglin, recognized as “a scientist in the tradition of Einstein,” ran for President of the United States in 2000 on the Natural Law Party ticket. His platform included helping to bring a more meditative mindset into every department, division nook and cranny of government, most impressively our state run public education system. And while he did not become President of the United States, in 2003 the renown quantum physicist announced the formation of the U.S. Peace Party, a new political party – over 100 top scientists and educators from 50 states stood at his side, as did 11 U.S. cabinet level representatives. His goal – to govern the nation “from the crucial level of collective consciousness.” Today, as a Professor of Physics and head of The Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy at Maharishi University, he is also helping further the construction of Transcendental Meditation’s 3000 new peace palaces around the world.
As Mr. Haeglin makes clear, meditation suggests types of power – personal power - that do not always lend themselves to co-operating with the existing civil institutions or conventional wisdom. It also demands authenticity, rejects judgments, the very idea of confrontation and, of course, the politics of war. The practice of meditation en masse threatens to rattle the basis of our market driven economies, since it demonstrates the futility of striving for anything “out there.” And most dangerously for the status quo, it restructures time.

The ego requires time, demands it, then toys with it endlessly- past times, future times, good times and bad, whatever gets your attention away from the here and now, what ever breaks the flow or rhythm or bigness of time and turns it into bites or bits. Something the ego can take charge of or worry you with.
Time used to be described by the sun: sunrise, sunset, dusk, mid day giving time some latitude, something of a rhythm, and even an atmospheric hue, a shade of grey or red or blue. Today we’re all connected at every moment thru our computers, cell phones and even our I pods to Greenwich Mean Time, we know exactly where we are on the clock to the second. It’s a constant we all can share along with the angst of almost always running out of time, multi-tasking and looking for a short cut.

In this our moving image age we even speak of “real time,” suggesting that we are so used to collapsing time through editing that experiencing real time is a scarce as eating an unadulterated peach. In fact, real time is available whenever we choose it and the ultimate act of experiencing it is to lose track of it completely. Real time is now. The only way to find more time is to lose your customary sense of it. To meditate is to practice “being” without time - or thoughts.

In the practice of Yoga, thoughts are classified as either memories (Samskara) or desire (Vasana). Desire leads you to go out in the world and do things, accumulate matter (shopping), relationships or retribution (Karma). It’s an endless cycle and when you’ve had enough, meditation allows you to at least temporarily place the cycle on pause. Practice meditation long enough, develop the ability to focus and you eventually change your priorities, your pastimes and pleasures, your diet and eventually every cell in your body.

Cells go into protective mode in response to our stress hormones. They close down. Both the immune system and the psyche become depressed. Meditation, we now know, along with a host of other activities that change the dynamics of our brain waves and our emotions, put our awareness and our body, at the very cellular level, into a more expansive, open state. One of the things we are then open to is the reality of the way things really are - in essence a communication with natural law and God consciousness. This is a conversation our bodies were designed for – thru not only the cells, and the entire neural network but also the chakra system.
The Upanishads, the ancient Hindu text, tells us that the earth meditates, the atmosphere meditates, the mountains, the heavens and the water meditate. Both science and ancient wisdom make it clear: the Universe has a mind. For us to meditate is for us to interact with it.

The fact is we are so disconnected from this universal mind and any subtle energy or natural frequency that we have to achieve a meditative state to remember what it sounds like. Once we do we open a bit, relax, and then many changes happen on many unsuspecting levels. We notice more synchronicity in our life, for example, and even our language lightens up, reflecting - in fact creating a shared awareness. We begin, perhaps, to let words like “etheric” and even “angelic” creep into our speech, we start talking about subtle energy in the board room – without shame. We begin to more confidently use the word “manifestation” and “intuition”. Our language becomes more expansive, and in so doing we provide a soft landing place for the coming age and a way of acknowledging and describing a powerful invisible world.

The question is “Can most westerners living a harried multi-media time obsessed existence really focus in 10, 20 or 30 minutes on getting to “no-mind” long enough to complete the journey?”
While more and more people are finding the time to make the trip, a larger population is playing along the edges of meditation through activities that render in the brain a certain flow, meditation light perhaps, but a definite step in the right direction.
Perhaps more and more people are getting the benefits of meditation without formally practicing it. It’s like something’s been dropped in the water and if we hold out long enough it’s quite possible the effects are readying an unsuspecting world for an all-embracing change.

From roller blading to ballroom dancing to management books and best sellers, practices that lend themselves to exercising the non-linear mind are flourishing and with it a language, a culture and an understanding are becoming integrated into everyday life. The result is, I believe, happier, less judgmental thinking on a mass scale and the possibility of a more spiritual mindset whether we recognize it as such or not.

One of the biggest selling books at the airport bookstore is “Blink” Malcolm Gladwell’s long essay on making decisions without the thinking mind. Gladwell hardly mentions meditation but the book is all about becoming familiar with forms of subtle energy not usually batted around the boardroom.

Eric Tolle, author of the “Power of Now” and one of today’s most articulate teachers of enlightenment, hardly even mentions the word “meditation” in nearly 200 pages of what often feels like near - direct transmission describing the path to higher consciousness.
Thich Nhat Hahn, the Vietnamese poet, noble laureate and meditation master returns to his new meditation retreat center Dear Park Monastery outside of Escondido this fall. One of the most distinctive parts of his practice is that formal sitting meditation plays such a small part in his meditation training. Such sessions are relatively brief, serving as something of a warm up for delightful conversations with the master. The real meditation practice is incorporated into every act, from picking up a spoon, to walking to the bath.

To live near the water (or any natural environment), if you are at all conscious is to live a more meditative life. The waves, the sky, the wind all large forces, and especially those associated with water seem to lend an atmosphere conducive to a more meditative mind set, or at least one more conversant with ripples, waves and invisible forces as opposed to corners, edges, stop lights and traffic lanes.

Surrounded by para sailing, surfing, roller balding, swing bike riding, wind surfing, kite surfing, hang gliding, kits flyers, skate boarding and other such loftier pastimes one has an opportunity to become more in tune to the subtler energy of the coming Aquarian age.

I know, nice work if you can get it. The fact is you can get it if you want it, and meditation and the meditative arts like yoga can begin to show you how, just don’t let time stand in your way. If you try and make time you will never have enough. The idea, as I understand it, is to whatever extend possible, completely resign from time, get off the wheel, take care of what you must, and let a lot more things take care of themselves. They will.n to show you how, just don’t let time stand in your way. If you try and make time you will never have enough. The idea, as I understand it, is to whatever extend possible, completely resign from time, get off the wheel, take care of what you must, and let a lot more things take care of themselves. They will.

Bob Belinoff is a Los Angeles documentary filmmaker and writes frequently about the media and consciousness. He can be reached at bob@digitalwkshop.com